Sinovoip Banana Pi M2 Ultra

Banana Pi M2 Ultra is a R40 based development board produced by Sinovoip.

Despite its name, the M2 Ultra is incompatible to previous Banana Pi boards (Banana Pi/M1/M1+/Pro/M2/M2+/M3/M64), due to a different SoC - requiring different boot loaders and drivers. It's another attempt to cash in on the Banana Pi's popularity with a SBC only sharing brand, name, form factor and GPIO header.

Sunxi support

Current status

Images

BSP

Manual build

You can build things for yourself by following our Manual build howto and by choosing from the configurations available below.

U-Boot

Mainline U-Boot

Use the Bananapi_M2_Ultra_defconfig (supported since v2017.05) build target.

Linux Kernel

Mainline kernel

Use the sun8i-r40-bananapi-m2-ultra.dtb (supported since at least 4.15) device-tree binary.

Tips, Tricks, Caveats

FEL mode

The unlabeled surface mount button next to the UART pins triggers FEL mode.

LEDs

The board has 3 LEDs, in red, green and blue, conveniently labeled R, G, and B.
The red LED also serves as the power LED by default.

SATA

The SATA port on this board provides real SATA (no USB-to-SATA bridge used) but performance seems similar to A20 though (main limitation being not that great sequential write performance -- see SATA page for details). The SATA power port is directly wired to DC-DC so connected disks will neither be powered when running on battery nor when users try to power BPi M2 Ultra through the Micro USB port. Without an appropriate PSU with 4.0mm/1.7mm barrel plug you can forget about powering a disk from the board. Please see also troubleshooting powering issues.

'Quality control' related problems

In case you experience HDMI or other problems with this board it's somewhat likely that the QC sticker is reponsible for (quality control seems to have a different meaning with this hardware vendor).

Adding a serial port

Locating the UART

The UART pins are located in the bottom right corner, next to the RJ45 Ethernet port.
They are marked as TX, RX and GND on the PCB.
Just attach some leads according to our UART howto.

Pictures

Also known as

The marketing material (e.g. the product page) also refers to the board as Banana Pi BPI-M2U.